Who should treat patients with cirrhosis?

Who should treat patients with cirrhosis? Can they be treated by a general practitioner, or perhaps specialist care is always necessary?

Pere Ginès: I think that at least at this particular point in time patients with cirrhosis are very complex from different perspectives and they should be treated in specialized centers, particularly by a gastroenterologist or hepatologist who has a lot of experience and who has been educated to treat patients with cirrhosis. In some settings this can be done in internal medicine also but requires physicians specialized in liver disease.

I do not think that the patient should be treated by general practitioners. I think that the role of general practitioners is to identify those patients who are at risk of having cirrhosis and then referring these patients to a specialized center for the identification of the disease.